by Tom Pawlik
Jack reached for the video camera and peered into the view screen. Through it, he could see the pale-green shape of Rudy’s limp body lying in the mud. Then, beyond, Jack saw movement. Several shadows appeared over the rim and scurried down the incline. Sharp, bony limbs scuttling in a flurry of movement.
It was more of the spiders, some nearly as big as the one that had been hiding in the bone pile, others considerably smaller. They skittered down into the pit, converging on Rudy’s corpse, tearing into it like a pack of wild dogs. Hisses turned to coarse growls and high-pitched shrieks. The flashlight shook and jittered, shooting its beam in various directions until finally it went out.
Jack closed his eyes and rolled onto his back, suppressing a sudden wave of nausea.
He thought of Rudy’s parents. How would he tell them? How could he explain the kind of gruesome death their son—his best friend—had just experienced?
These creatures were everything they had feared. Ravenous and violent. Despite the presence of the enormous millipedes, the food supply in this isolated ecosystem must have been scarce.
And yet it wasn’t so isolated, for they had stumbled across a subterranean killing field. Someone had been feeding these monsters human flesh, and now Jack wrestled to keep his fear from controlling him.
His nausea rose again, and this time he couldn’t stop it. He rolled to his side and vomited onto the rocky ledge, convulsing in choked sobs. Rudy had been the only real friend he’d ever had. The only one he’d ever trusted. They’d been a pair of outcasts in school. A couple of geeks with only each other for company.
And now, just like that, he was gone.
Jack felt Ben’s hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
He choked back his tears and wiped his mouth. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t get bit too, did you?”
Jack scooted himself away from the ledge and sat up. “No . . . sorry, I just lost it there.”
In the darkness, Ben’s voice replied, “I’m sorry about Rudy.”
“He was my best friend,” Jack said. “My only friend. He didn’t even want to come on this trip, but I talked him into it. I put a guilt trip on him.”
“This wasn’t your fault.”
Jack wiped the tears from his eyes. “Yes, it was. If I wouldn’t have made him come along, he’d still be alive.”
Below them, he could still hear the noises of the spiders feeding. He shook his head, dazed. “He seemed fine. You bandaged his leg. . . . He was okay.”
“It must’ve been some kind of venom. But it was so fast-acting.”
“What did his wound look like? When you were cleaning it, was there any discoloration or swelling?”
Ben paused before answering. “There were two puncture marks on his calf. Big ones. And the area was pretty red and swollen. I cleaned it as best I could with antibacterial ointment and wrapped it up. It didn’t seem to bother him that much.”
Jack just stared into the dark and shuddered.
“Bottom line is, we need to avoid getting bit at all costs,” Ben said with a grim tone.
Jack rubbed his eyes as a rush of frustration and anger ran through him. “This whole trip was a bad idea.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ben said again. “There wasn’t anything you could’ve done.”
Jack fell silent for a moment as his thoughts returned to Rudy. “How am I gonna tell his parents? What do I even say to them?”
“Let’s just make sure we get out alive so we can tell them,” Ben said. “We should get going. I don’t want to take the chance those things will find us up here.”
After several more minutes the frenzy below seemed to die down. Jack gathered his mental courage enough to take one more look through the camera. All was dark and quiet and the ground was still littered with bones. But Jack couldn’t tell which ones had belonged to his friend.
Ben clicked on a flashlight and scanned the pit below them. He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. They came out of nowhere, and now they just disappeared again.”
“Probably in one of those side passages,” Jack said, reeling with disgust. “Off digesting their meal.”
They inspected the ledge, which turned out to be larger than they’d originally thought. They had been sitting off to one side where it was only a few feet wide, but to their right, the ledge widened further into what appeared to be a sort of natural parapet or balcony overlooking the entire pit below. And behind them a tunnel led off into darkness. It was wide and relatively level, but it twisted and turned completely out of sight.
Ben pointed down the passage. “I guess we follow this tunnel to see where it leads.”
Jack felt numb and sick, and his mind was still in a fog of sorrow. “Let’s go.”
Ben stuck out an arm. “Hold up.” He peered into the tunnel.
“Now what?” Jack said.
“Turn off your light.”
Jack’s arms and neck bristled as he shut off his flashlight. Inside the tunnel he could see a dim yellow light flitting erratically across the rock walls.
Ben spoke in a tight whisper. “Someone’s coming!”
Chapter 11
“Get back against the side,” Ben said, herding Jack along the ledge.
Jack’s throat was dry with fear as he flattened himself against the rock wall. His head was still spinning from witnessing Rudy’s death. And now, when he thought things couldn’t get any worse, they had. The day had begun so innocuously but had suddenly turned into a nightmare of epic proportions.
He could hear voices echoing faintly down the passage—deep and guttural sounds, but distinctly human. And there were more than one. Jack could tell some sort of conversation was taking place, though he couldn’t discern anything specific. No recognizable words. And in moments he understood why.
They weren’t speaking English. In fact, it didn’t sound like any language he’d ever heard before.
The light coming down the tunnel was growing brighter and the voices more distinct. Jack’s heart pounded, and he fought every instinct inside him that screamed for him to run. It was an unnerving experience to feel so trapped, yet so completely exposed to whoever—or whatever—was approaching through the tunnel.
Ben tapped Jack’s shoulder and made some gesture, though Jack could barely see him against the glow emanating from the passage beyond. Jack shook his head, trying to indicate he didn’t understand what Ben was trying to communicate.
Ben pointed over the ledge into the pit and whispered, “We have to hide.”
“What? I’m not going back down there.” Not with those spiders lurking about. Not where what little was left of Rudy’s body lay torn to pieces.
The voices were growing steadily louder.
Ben moved to the rim of the ledge and pointed straight down. “We can hide in the bones.”
The bones? Jack blinked. The bones? He wondered now whether this whole situation had caused Ben to completely lose touch with reality. But before he could say anything further, Ben crouched down and slipped over the edge, disappearing into the darkness. Jack could hear the clack and rattle of bones below him. He pressed one hand to his eyes, grimacing with frustration. Now he really was alone.
He leaned his head back against the rock and tried to slow his breathing. He had to control his thoughts and analyze the situation. It might be possible that the men in the tunnel weren’t even dangerous, though his gut told him that was extremely unlikely. Everything he had witnessed—everything he had learned about this place—told him otherwise. Whoever was approaching most likely knew their way around these caves well enough. And the watch Rudy had discovered earlier seemed proof that whatever horrific events had led to this chamber of corpses were still going on to this day.
In any case, the spiders appeared to have departed, and the men in the tunnel would surely find him if he stayed where he was. So Jack knew with a sickening realization that Ben’s plan—as crazy as it seemed—had actually been the best course all along. Jack scooped up
the backpacks and paused a moment to gather his courage. Then he lowered himself over the edge.
He landed in the pile of bones, sinking to his waist in human remains. Fighting back his nausea again—which was easier now since he no longer had anything left in his stomach anyway—Jack rolled slowly to the bottom of the pile and burrowed underneath a mass of skeletal pieces. The stench was overwhelming, reminding him of a time he’d gone to the beach with his father as a boy and discovered that the tide had deposited a horde of dead fish onto the sand. He had all he could do to keep from gagging in the darkness.
He couldn’t see anything but utter blackness and hoped desperately that he was buried far enough to remain hidden from whatever might be coming along. He wondered again if some of these could be his own father’s bones. If his dad had met this kind of horrible death alone in these caves twelve years ago. But Jack pushed away those thoughts, determined to keep his wits about him. He had to keep still and stay quiet.
The voices continued in a stilted, halting conversation above him. Jack couldn’t tell how many men there were. At least three, he guessed. Maybe four. And the words themselves were a guttural, throaty dialect.
Jack wondered if it was possible that a remnant of an ancient tribe could still be living in these caves. Had they remained concealed from all modern knowledge? Or was it merely some bizarre cult that was using a hidden entrance to come and go from the cavern, bringing terrified victims for their demonic death rituals? Whoever they were, he could only assume for now that they were responsible for the horror in this place. The cave spiders were just animals, predators doing what they needed in order to survive. It was the humans who were the real monsters.
Jack could see a faint light glimmering across the cavern from above. He peered out through a patchwork of bones and bone fragments. Minutes passed with occasional verbal exchanges from the men standing above him. Jack closed his eyes. Deep breaths would prove useless in the rotting stink around him.
After a minute or two there came another sound, a sort of soft rustling. Jack resisted the temptation to crane his neck for a better view. Meanwhile the faint light above seemed to grow brighter as well. He could hear more movement, this time clear and distinct. He wondered where Ben had gone, whether he had disappeared down one of the side passages leading from the main cavern or if he too was hidden inside the pile of bones. But all Jack could do was wonder and hope. He didn’t dare risk trying to communicate.
Jack’s heart began racing faster as a yellow light came into his field of view, lowering from above. He concentrated on moving only his eyes to track the light. Any turn of his head could cause the bones around him to shift, giving away his position. The light paused, lingering at the edges of his vision for several seconds, then continued its descent.
Within seconds, Jack could recognize the source of the light. A lantern of some sort was being lowered on a rope into the pit. It clanked softly against the cave wall and spun on the rope. Jack couldn’t see much detail, only that there was a pale-yellow glow inside it.
It descended like a spider on a line of silk into the pit until it finally came to rest on the floor of the cave no more than thirty feet from him. It had a square metal frame with a large ring at the top and dusty glass plates on each side. He couldn’t see a flame inside the glass, yet it lit up the surrounding area with a sickly yellow light.
Just behind the lantern, Jack spotted a second rope descending. Or rather, a crude ladder. A series of rough-hewn wooden boards with holes in each end were suspended between twin lengths of knotted rope.
Jack concentrated on his breathing. The terror welling up inside him had tightened his chest, constricting his airflow. So he found himself unintentionally gasping for air, yet he knew he needed to keep absolutely still.
The bottom of the ladder began jiggling and wafting back and forth. Someone was obviously descending it.
Jack caught his breath as a figure came into view.
It was human as far as he could tell. From his limited vantage point Jack could see only a torso, tall and rail thin and almost entirely naked. The skin was an abnormally pallid hue—very nearly translucent—and he was clad only in a loincloth tied around his waist with a crudely beaded length of twine. Moreover, his flesh looked to be covered with a jagged network of delicate black lines. Jack at first thought it was some sort of woven netting, but as the gangly limbs moved about, he could tell it was a body etching or tattoo of some kind. The markings looked similar to the characters Jack had seen written on the wall earlier and in his father’s drawing, but he couldn’t make out the details in the dim light.
Nor could Jack see the man’s face, merely his arms and torso up to the sinewy pectoral muscles. He was extremely thin though not sickly or malnourished. Rather, his musculature appeared to be quite well defined, enhanced perhaps by the lack of pigmentation in the skin. His hands bore long, curving fingernails also black in color. Jack guessed they’d probably been decorated by the same procedure with which the man had marked the rest of his body.
The figure stood motionless, half-crouched as if poised for action. Jack guessed he was listening for some sign of the spiders. Whatever the creatures used it for, the clicking sounds they made at least gave away their presence and warned of their approach. But other than the gentle echoes of water trickling somewhere in the big chamber, there was only silence.
Jack held his breath and waited. The man was no more than ten or twelve feet away, and Jack could hear something that sounded like sniffing. He bit his lip, hoping desperately that the man wouldn’t smell him, and after several seconds he strode off, out of Jack’s line of sight. Jack was amazed that with such a gangly body, the stranger moved with a fluid, almost-graceful manner, slipping barefoot across the stones without making a sound.
Terror and fascination each fought for dominance as Jack’s mind bristled with questions. Could this stranger really be one remnant of a lost tribe of humans? Had the N’watu actually survived in these caverns all this time? How many more of them were there? How could they possibly have gone undetected by the modern world for so long? And were they as primitive as they appeared? Little more than a Stone Age culture? The lantern they carried seemed to indicate that they’d had at least some interaction with the outside world.
But more immediate than all of these questions was, what would they do to him if they discovered him hiding here? His heart pounded against his ribs as he worked to remain still.
Meanwhile the rope ladder continued swaying.
Soon another figure descended into view. The second N’watu reached the bottom and stood facing the direction in which the first one had gone off. A moment later Jack heard a voice coming from the darkness. The first man spoke in choppy, guttural syllables. But in a hushed tone. The second N’watu, standing in front of Jack, replied in a similar volume.
The first N’watu moved back into Jack’s view carrying something. Jack suppressed a gasp as he saw what it was: Rudy’s tattered nylon jacket. It looked like it’d been ripped to shreds. And it was covered in blood.
The two men faced each other, the one holding up the jacket in front of the other. Jack could only imagine what they were saying—no doubt discussing how someone had gotten into their cave undetected. They would probably assume the intruder had not been alone, for that’s what Jack would’ve assumed. Living in this dark, dangerous environment, their senses—especially their senses of hearing and smell—were most likely heightened. Maybe they could even smell Jack from where he lay, under a pile of human remains.
The second man strode off into the dark and returned with the corpse of the spider Ben had killed. He held it up by its big front legs as the others dangled down, limp. Its punctured underside still dripped yellowish fluid. They talked further in what Jack thought sounded like an argument. Perhaps they were debating their next moves. Should they search for other possible intruders? Or maybe just let their spider friends take care of them?
The first N’watu kept shaking Rud
y’s jacket. He seemed to be insisting on a particular point or a course of action. But his comrade did not appear convinced, nor was he quite as agitated. After another minute or two of discussion, the second man started climbing back up the rope ladder, carrying the enormous spider corpse along with him by a front leg.
The first man remained behind. He turned and faced out into the cavern again, perhaps searching for some sign of additional intruders. By now, Jack’s body was aching from remaining still so long inside the reeking mound of bones.
Then Jack noticed movement in his field of view. Something dark and shaped like an overturned coffee cup with multiple legs was crawling across the bones directly in front of his face. It was one of the species of beetles he’d seen earlier.
Jack gasped and jerked backward with an involuntary spasm. The bones shuddered and immediately the N’watu’s torso spun in his direction.
Jack could see the man’s sinewy abdomen moving with slow, steady breaths. He held out the lantern toward the bone pile and took a hesitant step closer. Jack fought the impulse to flee. Every nerve in his body screamed at him to jump out from the cover of his hiding place and run. But his sense of reason—as if barely clinging to the edge of a cliff—kept that impulse in check.
The N’watu held the lantern out before him and crept closer. In two cautious strides he was standing directly over Jack’s hiding place and crouched down to inspect the bone pile.
Then Jack got a look at his face.
Chapter 12
The face Jack saw staring in at him appeared only remotely human, marred by the same black etchings that covered the rest of his body. Jack gazed into white irises, void of any pigmentation at all and glowing eerily in the light of his lamp. His gaunt cheeks and bizarre tattoos created a face that looked more like a skull covered by a pallid layer of skin. And his head was completely hairless. Not even eyebrows.